Alcott’s Other Little Woman: Erotic Love and Victorian Childhood in “A Marble Woman: or, The Mysterious Model”

The article argues that Cecil, the protagonist of Alcott’s “A Marble Woman,” is eroticized from the very start of the narrative, and that Alcott’s entire plotline—of an innocent damsel-child in distress rescued by an adult benefactor who subconsciously covets her and eventually marries her—is quintessentially erotic. Thus underlined by desire rather than love, the novella plays on the Victorian eroticization of childhood